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Welcome back, tech enthusiasts! 🚀

After a short break (and some well-spent days in beautiful Barcelona), I’m back with a packed edition full of GitHub updates, cloud insights, and .NET advancements. Whether you’re diving into Copilot Extensions, exploring quantum computing breakthroughs, or navigating the growing debate on cloud sovereignty, this week has plenty to offer.

Here’s what’s in store:

• 🛠️ Hidden GitHub Actions gems + smarter billing automation

• 🤖 Copilot Extensions now GA + choosing the right AI model

• ⚛️ Microsoft’s Majorana quantum chip—what’s next for computing?

• ☁️ The European push for cloud independence + new AWS alternative

• 💾 Running Azure SQL databases for free—how to get started

• 🏗️ .NET 10 Preview 1 is here—check out what’s new!

From AI-driven development to future-proofing your cloud strategy, this edition covers a lot—so let’s dive in!

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GitHub Digest

Some interesting tips you can apply in your GitHub Actions workflow. Like how to send notifications to Slack, validate your workflows, check your licenses or cache dependencies.

My colleague Jesse Houwing is the king of GitHub administration and is doing wonders with automation. He takes care of our enterprise setup and yes, that includes the billing side. Read how he automated the cost center setup.

Extensions add context-aware functionality to your chats. It has been available for some while in private beta, public beta and now it is generally available. So browse the marketplace, or build your own.

Did you know you can select the model to use in Copliot? There is OpenAI, Gemini, Claude etc, but which one should you use?

Read more to find out how to evaluate an AI model.

The insights page got some love. Although small UI changes, but good to see a time slicer.

I do not see it yet on my account, but GitHub is making the enhanced billing features available for all account types, including personal ones. It gives you a more detailed overview.

Coding Corner

An enormous leap in computer power: a Majorana chip. A quantum chip that operates on a completely different level. Microsoft has heavily invested in this new chip and see it as the future of computing.

Between me writing this newsletter and you reading the contents, the world might have changed again. One thing that is for sure different is the way the USA looks at certain laws and legislation. And with the heavy use of US Cloud platforms like Azure in countries outside the USA, this can become an interesting problem.

In Europe, we need to build up our own services, but that is easier said than done. But who had thought that Lidl is taking steps in that direction? StackIt is one of the European cloud data center alternatives. Currently only available for companies in a set of countries, it does offer compute, storage, network and PaaS services (like messaging, logging, AI).

Of course, more services operate from within Europe and this GitHub repo contains a categorized list of them.

And related, why do you actually need open standards?

Don’t forget that software licenses can also be part of import tariffs. Can you move away from certain vendors or SaaS applications? When you use an open standard, you have more choices and freedom.

Building a rest-ful API is not an easy task, but there is a lot of guidance and standards available. For webhooks, not so much. There are some options, but how to do retries, security, timeouts, and payloads is not that obvious.

With Event Destinations, you get a new kind of pattern where producers can send payloads to systems that best fit the developers. For example, directly to AWS Eventbridge or RabbitMQ.

Stripe, Twillio, and Shopify are the first to use those and are basically sending data directly to brokers.

See the article below for an overview, or go directly to the site.

Porting Doom to run on pregnancy sticks, calculators, CPU visualizations etc. is some sort of a game to get Doom running on the most exotic hardware. And here we see another impressive project where Doom runs in Typescript. The guy took around a year to develop this solution and documented his work.

With such knowledge and energy, you do wonder if there was not a better use of his time…

Azure Updates & Insights

Did you know that Azure SQL databases are now free to use? I wrote down what you need to know to get free access to 10 SQL databases.

.NET Nook

The next version of .NET is now available in the first preview. So start playing with the features and find out what is new.

The merge hell when you needed to find out what has been changed in solution files. It is a mess with all those configurations and guids. Luckily, this is improved with the new SLNX file format. A much easier to read (and merge) file format for your project files.

So convert and switch over!

I think it was a year ago when Aspire was introduced and finally released with a stable version at MS Build. Now on version 9.1 we still see improvements.

Building distributed systems? Then you should be aware of the outbox pattern. Oskar describes how you can apply this pattern with Postgresql without doing any explicit polling. The Logical Replication feature allows you to get a stream of events in an efficient way.

Closing Thoughts

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